Free trade

Into the lion’s den

HE WAS asked to be bold, and in the end he was: on September 16th Bill Clinton went up to Capitol Hill, right into a caucus of hostile House Democrats, to plead his case for free trade. He even dared to joke with Richard Gephardt, the leader of the no-more-trade-deals faction in the party; but Mr Gephardt was brittle, and in the end furious that the president seemed to be ignoring the plight of workers short-changed by previous trade deals. Of course most Americans, even Democrats, support free trade in the abstract. But Mr Clinton is seeking renewal of “fast-track” authority to negotiate trade deals, and that is an altogether more difficult sell.

Despite its apparent bolstering of presidential power, “fast-track” is a congressional invention: devised, in fact, by a committee headed by the redoubtable Russell Long in 1974. The measure is really a mutual promise: if the president consults copiously with Congress and lets it know how trade negotiations are going, Congress will vote quickly and without amendment on any bill to implement a trade agreement that Congress has authorised.

The key word is “consultation”. Congress naturally wants a lot of input in trade treaties, so if it cannot amend them afterwards it will want to influence them beforehand. The 1993 North American Free-Trade Agreement, the last deal but one to benefit from fast-track, got the process a bad name because NAFTA's opponents were caught on the hop: they had not done enough to influence the deal beforehand, and their amendments afterwards (in the form of “side-agreements” on labour and the environment) have been too puny to make much difference.

On September 16th, therefore (and in the weeks before, as it struggled to write the bill), the administration trod with enormous care. To begin with, it removed the words “fast-track”, and “NAFTA expansion” from its vocabulary, replacing them with the tripping “Renewal of Traditional Trading Authority”. This was clever packaging. No reminders of the controversial recent past; no hint of undesirable haste or slickness; simply a modest request for a return to the way that things had been done in the good old days. The president's opponents saw through it, of course. But perhaps a few of them will be moved to cast a more reasonable eye on his request.

The administration also promised plenty of consultations with Congress, and said that workers' rights and environmental protection would be among its objectives in trade negotiations. It pledged to negotiate separate side-agreements in new trade deals wherever these were called for. What it would not promise—despite strident Democratic appeals—was to place labour and environmental standards at the heart of all new trade deals, and to enforce them with the threat of sanctions.

This threw the Gephardt forces into a sulk; and the trade unions, as if they had never intended to listen to the president at all, immediately announced that they were starting a radio and television campaign against fast-track. It was an indicator of how fierce the struggle for this bill will be. And not simply on the left: a Harris poll, taken on September 3rd-7th and published in Business Week, shows that 71% of Americans believe NAFTA has had no effect on them; that 54% oppose its extension to other countries; and that the same number oppose the renewal of fast-track authority.

The administration's record of standing up for principles is shaky, and the more so as 2000 approaches. True, the booming economy confirms that Americans have no reason to oppose trade deals for fear of losing their jobs. But the burgeoning trade deficit, especially with Japan, convinces free trade's opponents of something else: that free trade does not always seem to be the best deal for America. Great conviction will be needed to sustain the opposite case.